Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 1, April 1997, pp. 9-28 Hume and the Bellman, Zerobabel MacGilchrist ROGER L. EMERSON In 1750 Hume finished his second Enquiry and was probably finishing up a draft of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. He was thirty-nine and had been thinking about religious topics since his teens and writing about them for over twenty years. Indeed, as he told Gilbert Elliot on 10 March 1751, "tis not long ago that I burn'd an old Manuscript Book, wrote before I was twenty; which contain'd Page after Page, the gradual Progress of my Thoughts on that head."1 By 1751 his "Progress" had brought him to a very curious position. Formally he remained a Presbyterian willing to subscribe the Westminster Confession as his own beliefs, to attend church—if need be to instruct university students in Christian verities—and presumably to accept the discipline which his established church imposed upon its members. All that had to be true if he really expected to be considered for a university post. As late as 4 February 1752, he would express chagrin at being passed over at Glasgow when a new professor of logic was chosen.2 Publicly, Hume had denied no tenets of the Kirk established by law, although his scepticism had found altogether too much to be based upon both reason and testimony. And, just as publicly, his scepticism had undercut the arguments which allowed for a belief in the validity of any and all reported miracles. Privately, he was clearly even less religious than he wished publicly to appear to be. He was a scoffer and jester, a ridiculer of "priests," among whom ministers might be numbered, and one who could reasonably be classed among the agnostics whom his age Roger L. Emerson is at the Department of History, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2. 10 Roger L. Emerson called deists or atheists. Many, such as Francis Hutcheson, William Wishart, Jr., and others who wrote against Hume's works, had little reason to think him pious or a believer. But others, like the Rev. Messrs. Robert Wallace, Alexander Webster, and Patrick Cuming seem not to have been put off by his early works. Wallace at least remained a friend as did the Edinburgh literati, at least one of whom seems to have thought him a Christian even at the end of his life.3 Duplicity of this sort Hume may have found difficult to live with. In any case, in 1751 he chose to appear publicly, but anonymously, as the scoffer and jester that he was. The work in which he did so is "THE PETITION OF THE Grave and venerable BELLMEN (or Sextons) of the Church of SCOTLAND, to the Hon. House of Commons." to which was attached "A LETTER to a MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, with the foregoing PETITION." signed "ZEROBABEL4 MACGILCHRIST, / Bellman of BUCKHAVEN."5 The broadside squib was finished before 18 February 1751, presumably while Hume worked on the draft of the Dialogues and enjoyed the furore arising amongst the orthodox from his essay "On Miracles," which had appeared in 1748. It is thus reflective of more serious concerns with religion than those which it seems superficially to address: the schemes proposed for the increase in both the stipends of ministers and the salaries of schoolmasters. Behind the wit, there seems to be a clear intention to mock scripture, to cast doubt upon the lineage and functions of Christ the Saviour, and incidentally to point out foolishness in Freemasonry and the danger of joining too closely both politics and religion—a sin of which both Covenanters and Jacobites had been guilty. While Hume intended both to ridicule the schemes to raise salaries and to amuse his friends, he clearly had more serious ends in view. These his adopted persona helped him to accomplish, but they were ends which made it imperative to publish anonymously and to conceal his authorship. It should not surprise us that "the printers in Edinburgh refused to print it" (HL I 149). What should surprise us is that Hume would run the risks to his reputation and career which printing such a piece...